Even President Obama's expanded federal pay freeze is still wanting: An editorial

President Obama is expanding the number of federal workers subject to a two-year, partial pay freeze. That's a step in the right direction, but the president and Congress should move to also halt automatic longevity pay raises.

Associated PressPresident Barack Obama

The president's original plan, which Congress approved earlier this month, suspended cost-of-living pay increases for most of the 2.2 million federal employees in 2011 and 2012. Active-duty military personnel will continue to earn the pay increases, as they should when the country is fighting two wars. But many other federal civilian workers also were excluded from the original proposal.

President Obama fixed much of that with an executive order last week that applied the cost-of-living pay freeze to an additional 650,000 federal employees. Those include public health doctors and nurses, administrative law judges, auditors and other staff in relatively high-paying positions. Their salaries are not based on the federal pay scale set by Congress but are set instead by federal agencies. These employees needed to be included in the pay freeze, as the president has now done.

But even this expanded directive still allows automatic step increases granted to many federal employees based on longevity. Those should be curtailed as well. After all, the vast majority of Americans working in the private sector have seen such increases disappear -- or their wages drop -- in the past two years.

Federal employees have fared much better than private sector workers in the past decade -- so they can't complain about facing a pay freeze now. According to government statistics compiled by the Cato Institute, average federal wages exploded 58 percent between 2000 and 2009, while average compensation in the private sector grew by 30 percent. As a result, federal civilian workers averaged an $81,258 salary last year, way above the $50,464 average for their private counterparts. The gap is even wider if benefits such as health insurance and retirement are included.

That hasn't stopped leaders of some federal worker unions from complaining about the partial pay freeze. Those union leaders need to get a grip.

In the current economy, the private workers who pay for federal salaries with their taxes simply cannot afford to continue granting pay raises.